David W Landrum’s tale of a romance between a reclusive physicist and an anachronistic thespian echoes Shakespearean themes of predestiny.
Min Yuan liked working for a physics laboratory. She had trained diligently, mastered her subjects in undergraduate and graduate school, and taken the job she had always dreamed of having. She did mathematics to calculate and describe the dynamics of sub-atomic particles; occasionally she traveled to the east coast and helped with experiments that involved a cyclotron.
She had just turned thirty-two, was still a virgin, and had not gone on a date since graduate school six years ago. She lived, she told herself with bitter amusement, like a Buddhist nun: apartment as plain and spare as a room in a serenity house (the Buddhist term for a convent), no sexual expression, a simple diet, and devotion to her calling in life, which, in her case, was the advancement of science.